Waterstones welcomes Kindle with ‘light-hearted’ campaign

Waterstones has launched a “light-hearted” branding campaign to coincide with selling rival company Amazon’s Kindle in its stores.

Slogans and signage advertising the Amazon-Waterstones partnership will be rolled out as an outdoor and press advertising campaign in the run-up to Christmas, with the new Kindle Fire tablets and Paperwhite e-readers going on offer to Waterstones customers for the first time alongside older models. The partnership between Waterstones and Amazon was announced in May this year to the surprise of many inside and outside the industry.

Examples of the slogans are: “Waterstones? Great. Kindle? Great. What’s the word for doubly great? (We should know this.)”; “The new Kindle. The new Kindle Fire is obviously a clever device. It’s found its way into our bookshops”; “Fits in your pocket. Fits nicely in your bookshop”; and “You can’t beat being in a good bookshop. And Kindle would agree.”

The Kindle–Waterstones advertising complements new Waterstones-specific branding recently put into stores that emphasises the benefits of a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, using slogans such as “Books you can’t put down are much easier to find when you can actually pick them up.”

James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones, said he was “delighted” to offer customers Kindles. “Through the partnership with Amazon’s Kindle, we extend the pleasures of our bookshops to digital readers. It enhances our bookshops, a further milestone in the transformation underway at Waterstones,” he said.

Marketing director Ros Hines added: “We know we raised some eyebrows when we announced this partnership. But we have had a great response from our customers so far and this campaign is a light-hearted, wry way of announcing the arrival of the much-anticipated new family of Kindles into our shops.”